Saudi Crown Prince MBS Rallies Arab Leaders on Gaza Plan to Thwart Trump
 
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is striving to rally fellow Arab leaders around a plan for postwar Gaza that would serve as an alternative to proposals put forward by US President Donald Trump, and ensure Palestinians aren’t displaced from the war-ravaged territory.
 
The kingdom’s de-facto leader is expected to host counterparts from Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in Riyadh on Friday to discuss the proposal, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The plan would see internally displaced Palestinians temporarily housed in Gaza’s open spaces while reconstruction gets underway, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters.
 
The details have been worked on mainly by Egypt and Jordan — the countries Trump has said should take in Gazans — with input from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, they said. They need the full backing of the UAE, which is focused on postwar governance of the enclave.
 
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The plan for what happens after the Israel-Hamas war was slated to be unveiled at an Arab League summit in Cairo at the end of February, but the date has been pushed back to early March, said the people. That will allow more time for consultations, they said.
 
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What’s been referred to in Arab media as ‘the Egyptian plan’ is divided into two main phases, according to people who have been briefed on its details.
 
The short- and medium-term components call for Gazans to be sheltered in new temporary housing during efforts to remove rubble created by the massive Israeli bombardment of urban areas.
 
Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the US and many other countries, will cease to have any formal role in running the territory’s affairs, with authority delegated to a new body that will be known in Arabic as Lajnat El-Isnad Al-Mujtamaiee, or the societal support committee, the people said.
 
That will be largely made up of Gaza notables and city-council-like functionaries and overseen by a higher body made up of representatives of key Arab states, they said. Security will be controlled by a police force vetted and trained mainly by Egypt and including elements of the Palestinian Authority, which runs parts of the West Bank, said the people, who added that the issue of how to disarm Hamas isn’t addressed in the plan.
 
Israel has ruled out the PA’s involvement and is unlikely to trust that Hamas isn’t playing a part, officially or otherwise, an issue that may complicate any implementation of the proposal.
 
The longer-term aspects of the roadmap address the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Gaza, with potential funding from Gulf Arab states, Europeans and others tied to the establishment of a political pathway toward a Palestinian state. Israel, which would need to buy in to the proposal, is firmly against the latter idea.
 
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Standing alongside his partners in Israel’s newly announced war cabinet, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday pledged to obliterate Hamas, at the close of the fifth day of war against the terror group controlling the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of Hamas terrorists burst into southern Israel and carried out a devastating assault on Saturday, killing at least 1,200 people, most of whom were civilians, and many of whom were massacred.
 
“We will wipe out this thing called Hamas,” Gallant said in the Wednesday evening press conference. “Hamas — the Islamic State of Gaza — will be wiped from the face of the earth. It will not continue to exist. There will be no situation in which Israeli children are murdered and we all go about our business.”
 
Gallant described the Hamas onslaught as “the worst terror attack the world has ever seen.” And he cited “children bound together and murdered, people burned, barbaric deeds that the Jewish people has not suffered since 1945.”

Eyal Barad was in the safe room of his home in Nir Oz for more than 12 hours on Oct. 7 while Palestinians went on a rampage of his Gaza envelope kibbutz, eventually kidnapping or murdering more than a quarter of its residents. (...) Most of the time, though, Barad was glued to his phone, watching the live feed of a camera he had recently installed outside his home to monitor speeding cars. Images from the feed, which I obtained, show Palestinian women and children—some appearing as young as 8 years old—taking part in the horror of that day.
 
Survivors’ accounts, video evidence, and the interrogation recordings of apprehended Palestinians paint a damning picture of the complicity of Gazan civilians both in the Oct. 7 attack, in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and 240 people were abducted to Gaza, and its aftermath. It is one that has sparked a debate in Israel that challenges the inclination to draw distinctions between ordinary Palestinian civilians of Gaza—often referred to in Israel as bilti me’uravim (uninvolved)—and their terror leaders. For many, Oct. 7 reeked of something that Jews have been familiar with for centuries; a phenomenon where not just a vanguard, but a society at large participates in the ritual slaughter of Jews.
 
Around 700 Palestinians stormed Barad’s kibbutz of Nir Oz—less than a five-minute drive from Gaza—that day, CCTV footage shows. The overwhelming majority of those, estimated by Eran Smilansky, a member of the kibbutz’s security squad, to be around 550, were civilians. They were largely unarmed and not in uniform. Some of those civilians carried out wholesale acts of terror themselves, including rape and abduction—and in some cases, the eventual sale of hostages to Hamas—while others abetted the terrorists. Others still simply took advantage of the porous border to loot Israeli homes and farms, including stealing hundreds of thousands of shekels in agricultural equipment.
 
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Differentiating between terrorists and civilians is tricky, particularly since Hamas terrorists often wear civilian clothing, a tactic evident in the ongoing war in Gaza. However, other indicators help make this distinction, such as the absence of weapons and the fact that many were filmed crossing the border barefoot or even on horseback. Even senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk readily admitted that Gaza civilians had taken part in the Oct. 7 atrocities.
 
One video shows a group of men in civilian clothing beating a soldier while a separate image shows another group of what appears to be civilian men celebrating atop the smoking husk of a burned-out tank. In the infamous 47-minute terror reel of the Oct. 7 atrocities, Palestinians in civilian clothing are seen beating elderly hostages with sticks. Another repeatedly screams “Allahu akbar!” as he decapitates a Thai farm worker with a garden tool.
 
Barad’s speed camera in Nir Oz includes images of a Palestinian girl riding a stolen bike. In another, a Palestinian woman is seen pointing out Barad’s neighbor’s home to a uniformed terrorist. An image captured later shows a resident of that home being hoisted onto a motorcycle to be taken into Gaza.
 
But it’s the testimonies of the survivors that provide the clearest evidence that Oct. 7 was not just a terrorist attack, but a pogrom.
 
Batya Holin is a photographer and peace activist from Kfar Aza, which alongside Nir Oz and Be’eri, was one of the heaviest-hit communities. Holin had developed a friendship with a Gazan photographer, Mahmoud, with whom she arranged a joint exhibit last year of photos of her kibbutz and his village in the Gaza Strip. On the morning of Oct. 7, Mahmoud called and interrogated Holin, asking her how many soldiers were in her vicinity. That was when Holin realized that Mahmoud had given the photos of her village to Hamas.
 
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Echoing Holin’s testimony, former hostage Nili Margalit said that “civilians, regular people,” abducted her to Gaza in one of the kibbutz’s golf carts. Likewise, an NBC News investigation found that Noa Argamani was likely kidnapped by a civilian mob. A video of her abduction shows her unarmed captors wearing regular clothes. Argamani may have been later handed over or sold to Hamas.
 
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Then there are the Gazans who worked at the kibbutzim. Yohanan’s husband, a farmer, is one of many people in the Gaza periphery communities who hired Palestinian workers from Gaza. Like many others I spoke to, Yohanan believed that the terrorists were acting on inside knowledge obtained by those Gazan workers. Israel had gradually raised the number of work permits in the months leading up to Oct. 7 with an estimated 18,500 Gazans working in Israel before the onslaught. The thinking behind the policy was that economic incentives to the residents of the Strip would sustain the fragile peace. Hanan Dann, from Kfar Aza, told me that he was “glad that workers from Gaza were coming to Israel to have jobs and meet Israelis, to see that we’re not all devils.”
 
In several of the devastated communities, detailed maps were found on the bodies of dead terrorists, maps that residents say could have only been drawn up by people with intimate knowledge of the area. Gazan workers relayed an extensive range of information to Hamas that enabled the terror group to plan its attack with extraordinary meticulousness, including the identities and residences of security heads, the locations of electric boards and communications systems and how to disable them.
 
The workers’ betrayal left an indelible mark on the surviving kibbutzniks, leading many to reexamine previously held beliefs about their Palestinian neighbors. Nir Oz, like many of the other ravaged kibbutzim in the area, was home to scores of peace activists, many of whom volunteered for a program known as Road to Recovery, driving sick Gazans to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Many now believe that while there are Gazans who want to live in peace, they do not represent the majority; or, as one survivor summed it up to AFP, “there are more who don’t want us alive.”
 
Irit Lahav, whose parents were from Nir Oz’s founding members, described the community as a “peace lovers’” kibbutz. “It broke my heart. How can we ever get over this sense of betrayal?” Lahav, who shuttled Palestinian cancer patients several hours from the border with Gaza to their treatments in central Israel, told me. “The Palestinian public simply hates us.”
 
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IDF Sgt. Adir Tahar was murdered and decapitated during the invasion while manning a post near the Erez border crossing. His father, David, was forced to bury his son’s body without his head. An interrogation of two Palestinians by Israel’s Shin Bet security agency revealed that the remains of the head—which had been mutilated until it barely resembled a human skull—were kept in the freezer of an ice cream store in Gaza. One of the men had tried to sell the head for $10,000. The man in question was a Palestinian civilian and not a Hamas operative, Tahar told me.
 
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In several cases, Palestinian families held hostages in their homes. Released hostage Mia Schem said she was being held by a family in Gaza. “Entire families are in the service of Hamas,” she told Channel 13. Avigail Idan, the 4-year-old Israeli American whose parents were murdered, was also held in the homes of several Palestinian families. When former hostage Russian Israeli Roni Krivoi remarkably managed to escape his captors during an Israeli air raid, he hid alone for several days before being discovered by Gaza civilians, he said, who returned him to Hamas.
 
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